With the recent #Occupy movement continuing to gather traction globally, I decided to investigate what disruptive technology innovations are lined up in personal finance. Democratizing governments and changing regulations may take some time – but we can challenge financial institutions by adopting new services that reduce our dependency on them and save us money – and here’s how.

TransferWise is a peer to peer currency exchange start up. The start up offers users the true mid-market rate for currency exchange by matching other users trading in the opposite currency. There is a myriad of services operating in the currency exchange space who claim ‘No commission’, yet the markup that they offer is absolute rip off. There certainly is a time-value of money, but why would you have to pay extra for inefficiencies in the system? Banks are increasingly adopting efficient ways for handling settlements, so how do they justify the spread they charge for online transactions?

Taavet Hinrikus, co-founder of TransferWise was formerly the Director of Strategy in Skype and is an investor in several startups. He came across the idea for TransferWise about five years ago, when, after looking at the difference in buy and sell rates in his bank in the UK, he decided to call a friend in Estonia to ask if anyone needed british pounds and managed to do the swap between themselves.

Every month, more than a million pounds are exchanged through TransferWise. Currently, transfers are restricted to EUR and GBP only, but they are working on getting the US Dollar operational in 2012. The charges associated with domestic transfers between banks, makes dealing with the USD a little tricky. Transferwise charges a flat fee of £1 for any transfer – and that is used to run the operation.

The company is also working on making the payments process easier so that instead of having to fill in a form, the payment information comes as a pre-populated URL with account details and transfer amount. The average daily turnover for the forex market is in excess of $4 trillion and TransferWise has only begun scratching the surface.

If only if the service were operational a couple of years back – I would have saved a significant amount of money during my time studying and paying recurring tuition fees and rent!

Some people are extremely meticulous about their credit card bills. Others like me tend to overlook these – not because we trust everything that is on the bill – but because it is time consuming. We have probably never thought about how much hidden charges and cryptic merchant fees cost the average user.

According to their estimates, BillGuard reckons that the average consumer could save more than $300 through avoiding charges.The engine behind flagging suspicious charges takes into account information, not only from other users who may have flagged a similar charge or payment, but also from other news sources.

What is common between BillGuard and TransferWise is the fact that these technologies are increasingly empowering consumers to take more control of their finances. Although BillGuard is not a direct threat to financial institutions themselves, merchants will come under the scanners once user recommendations gather enough traction to expose ineffeciencies.

TransferWise on the other hand, can have a very significant impact on the digital generation. The more it evolves into a user friendly and trusted service, it can begin to disrupt the fundamental mechanism in which foreign exchange services make money off consumers.

Using the oyster card you can now take part in daily missions, campaigns, zone competitions and other games. The objective is to complete these games and earn achievements, similar to Foursquare badges or Gowalla pins. Users need to provide Chromaroma with either a registered Oyster card or a Boris Bike key, and their data is then examined. This data is provided by Transport for London with a 72 hour delay. Chromaroma connects communities of people who cross paths and routes on a regular basis, and encourages people to make new journeys and use public transport in a different way by exploring new areas and potentially using different modes of public transport.

I like the concept of using the RFID-enabled Oyster card as a mechanism for finding out your location details from public records (TFL). The gamification element is similar to 4SQ and Gowalla but it is based on mobility. Also, if you are aware of the recent World of Fourcraft campaign that turned NY into a game of risk, then you should not be surprised.

Murlark, the agency behind this campaign, has created some innovative campaigns before, such as the live Twitter take on Romet and Juliet, which I loved in principle

With the responsibility of procuring the right toolkit for managing the consultancy wing at work, I was recently thrown into the ever increasing cauldron of social media management and monitoring tools. Excited, at the prospect of fiddling around with new technologies and calling up some old connections, I started wondering how much of a problem this must be for most organizations as they are grappling with new platforms in Social Media everyday.

I recently came across an interesting paper from Forrester about Social Media Maturity of organizations. In principle, I think this has to be one of the best attempts in developing a framework for understanding the life cycle and evolution of a brand’s social organization. Scale is usually not the basis of selection (from the procurer’s end), especially since this is something most social technologies have in their consideration , but it is the page management, campaign deployment and insight generation (and pricing, of course) that sets some platforms apart from the others

The following is an attempt to simplify the selection process and provide a ‘thought framework’ which could help you to identify your partner social technologies and why some networks are more important to you, depending on your evolutionary trail. As an aside, I was watching an interesting TED talk about how all organizations are destined to die (and how cities survive) …which throws up interesting facts about the need for continuous innovation for organizations.

On a less morbid note, lets try and stitch together why is understanding the social maturity of an organization important to selecting the right ‘war chest’ for your battle.

Dont bring a knife to a gun fight

The choice of channels and tools will depend on your competitive positioning, your industry and the life-stage you are in as an organization.

I shall cite two examples in my post – two very different types of organizations. We’ll be looking at

Spatial positioning of organizations based on Competitive Advantage

British Petroleum and the second a fictional technology start-up. A very basic strategic analysis will reveal that the companies are in polar opposite spaces. (BP is in a stalemate and the Tech start up in a specialised position – although this could effectively be fragmented as well)

In line with this, the strategic needs of the organizations are also going to be different.

In summary, BP could be said to be in the following state

Few number of competitors

High barriers to entry

Threats from a growing environmentally aware community

Image problems with the recent oil spill

So how does this look from a social media point of view – i.e., what would I consider to be the most important functions for BP to perform on social channels?

To demonstrate this, I shall be using an underlying framework that was published by Booz & Co in their report, and highlight how this framework would look for BP

BP

So here’s the rationale for the toolkit and channels –

With emerging trends of citizen journalism and twitter playing an increasingly important role in getting real time information and public opinion out, political upheavals and corporate catastrophes like the BP oil spill are going to be spoken about regardless of whether you are ‘officially’ on social or not. period. To manage ‘sentiment’ – Radian 6 is supposed to have the widest range of curating comments.

Syncapse allows multi page and multi language page management. This is bound to be a useful feature for every country in which BP is present. Something of the scale of BP’s oil spill, of course, spread to other countries. This would likely provide a strong enabler for a crisis communications framework.

Corporate social responsibility would also be high on BP’s radar. Over a period of time, BP would have to renew faith in the consumer that they are a environmentally responsible organization and the best way to showcase this would through videos about causes they have been supporting.

Powering innovation through social media and new media tools

Our fictional tech start up however, has a different set of issues to address. It has come up with a great idea that could have a lot of traction. Lets say they are 6 months into the development of the product and about a week back, they really figured out what they were looking for. However, they need more proof that this could work.

I’ve tried to provide an indicative view of what it might look like for this organization over a period of time. Early stage development would have certain strategic priorities on particular channels and post launch, other channels would gain more importance and a different set of tools would be required to manage these.

Twitter, blogs and other thought leadership platforms can generate a wealth of good advice for start up products.

4-5 months down the line however, things would be looking very different for the start up. The firm would have developed a minimum viable product (and a great presentation by the instagram guys on this) and would be looking for wider feedback that they could harness to develop as features for their core product.

After an initial proof of concept is in place, it is also likely that they would want to partner with other ecosystem technologies to maximize their reach to consumers in the social web. Instead of lead generation, the next phase would really emphasise the growth of the brand and raise awareness about the product. Often during this phase it is important to get wider community feedback regarding the product to ensure that the users are having a good experience and this is the acid test as the product moves beyond a community bias (sometimes likely in a beta-tested environment).

Post launch, raising awareness is key and a more intensive CRM system may be required for identifying key accounts for growth.

Find your HEROes

Forrester calls them Hight Empowered Resourceful Operatives. And quite rightly so – that’s exactly the kind of resources you need to drive your social organisation. What social media introduced into the marketing funnel is the dimension of advocacy, and this, as a result, throws the focus back on the people dimension for success of social media programs.

In essence, to drive the success of your social program, it is perhaps not enough to evaluate just People Process and Technology. Senior stakeholders need to have what Forrester calls a POST approach. Namely, People, Objectives, Strategy and Technology.

The fact is that your social channels are very sticky but fluid assets that have a life of their own. The channels also tend to influence each other’s growth and have very different behaviours when they cross the threshold limits. While it is perfectly sane to have certain benchmark KPI’s to set yourself for the channels, it is necessary to visualize how the channels can be optimally used for meeting your strategic objectives.

Needless to say that there are numerous battlefronts (especially from the content creation end of things and companies like Soundcloud and RJDJ are spearheading this space) there are also others which are integrating location services with venue management and ticketing, but lets focus on commercial music ecosystem for now. The other developments will certainly be the key for long term sustainable growth of music, but there are more pervasive, immediate problems to resolve.

Spotify took up arms against piracy and it seems to have done a reasonably good job. Look at how South Korea has transitioned into a well functioning legal digital music ecosystem while Spain is suffering (The Spanish top 50 did not feature a single local artist). What Spotify also did was kill the idea of Nokia music and certainly shot down the idea of Sky Music – ISP music providers were busy battling with consolidating repertoires and picking fights with Apple and Amazon.

However, the freemium model is unsustainable – perhaps not for We7, but then it’s at a compromise for user experience, and based on historical evidence, better UX wins! Hands down!

My sense is that the over-arching trend will be ubiquitous music and the focus on discovery as opposed to search. Sure, search is what separated the winners from the losers (iTunes said you dont have to download albums any more, only the song you want) – but the next paradigm shift has been cloud (and Spotify has been one of the forerunners of that) – but what’s the next big step?

1. The Consumption Battlefronts –

The idea is to carve out every listening hour/minute that you can out of a music listeners life. To top that off – give them more that they can discover, both socially, and through recommendation algorithms. Lets see which are the fronts are already waging wars –

a. The Web / Streaming media –

They are all here – Grooveshark, Spotify, Rdio, Pandora, We7 etc. This is the holy grail for streaming music models and nothing will go away. Each one has their own business model, however, the battle is an ongoing one and will ultimately depend on the user experience and the price points.

What wins? – This is the hook. Free services will inevitably gain market share faster. However, the eventual winner (making money) will be the one that is cross platform.

People serious about their music would not mind paying from here on.The stronger the eco-system that a service can create around this, and the more seamless the experience between the feature rich web experience and this, the more competitive that service will be.

For now, lets just leave aside the wireless/3G argument – because streaming music consumption both zaps power and data packets.Streaming music over cellular networks is more of a cost consideration than a performance issue.

While there will inevitably be diversity in platforms for services, I dont think being simply ‘mobile-compatible’ is the way to go for the streaming services. There has to be an app to provide a rich experience. So while honeycomb/android platforms will allow for sites like We7 to provide a service (and iPad will not), yet, you will most certainly need to take advantage of the platform to provide a better user experience.

What wins? – In my humble opinion – offline sync with Spotify is just amazing. For me, this feature itself was good enough for me to dispel with my iTunes player from my iPhone and replace it with Spotify.

c. Car Audio!

Yes, Radio will always play an important part (someone is talking at the other end, while you are trying hard to stay awake), but for the long drive along the coast – you surely want to have an uninterrupted playlist!

Pandora led the way in this (after satellite radio did not pay off) and is reaping the benefits of first mover advantage. However, focussing purely on car audio is a subtle position to take – if your phone already has an app in it (that both streams and plays downloaded songs) and you could connect your phone to the car audio system – a native music streaming service in your car audio system hardly makes sense right?

Integrated Car Audio systems are unlikely to gain anything from maintaining exclusive relationships with music service providers. The market is pretty fragmented and competitive – the most open ended integrator (plays iTunes, Rdio, Pandora and Spotify ) will win.

d. IPTV apps

Now this is the big fish! Integrated home entertainment and communications. A whole lot of things are competing in this space – Tivo, Boxee, Roku, the works! The US consumer market is already heating up but the UK is still to adopt this. This will create a whole new wave of allegiances amongst telecom giants and manufacturers. Ultimately it will be up to the development ecosystems and the applications to pick the winning battles – i.e. market penetration of the hardware will largely depend on the telecom operator – packaged deals will be the order of the day.

The question is – for a household then, would you give away 2 Spotify accounts for £10 over a year long contract so that dad and son can listen to their own music on the TV and while on the move?

2. The Social Experience Battlefronts –

If you are a true music aficionado, then you will want your music in more ways than one. There will beabsolutely nothing that beats the joy of visiting an old record store, a chat with the store owner about why the particular record you are clutching with dear life, was the best work of Charlie Parker ever.

Then coming back home and playing the gritty vinyl tracks on your Hi Fi with the hiss and noise to go with.

If it’s a rare Blue Note recording – would you rather hear it while sitting sweating in a bus travelling through the city – or would you rather be in the cool of your shelter, with a nice glass of scotch and listening to a rusty cackling voice through your extra large wooden speakers, appreciating the lovely square extra large album artwork? (psst…. the Spotify guys have found a way to get somewhat into this space too, but it would be interesting to know what the statistics say about usage in this space)

It is good to see that iTunes has tapped into a white space to monetize too – The iTunes festival (I won 2 sets of free tickets!!) is nothing more than what bootlegging used to be – except in a digital, more modernistic stance. Good stuff.

What wins? – The music wins! Some things are meant to be special and stay special – there is no recommended way of listening to this. The only way is the way you like it best.

3. The Cost Battlefronts a.k.a (Wireless v/s 3G/4G) –

So streaming music it is. While it’s fine to have this within the known realm of music consumption – i.e. your workplace, or your home – what happens when you are mobile and on the move?

There has already been a lot of hue and cry over data consumption over cellular networks, especially over the UK / EU area and there continues to be stories published about people returning from 3-4 days vacations and being presented with a massive telephone bill.

Rdio, MOG, Rhapsody have covered this base, but Pandora and Last FM are out of this game.

4. The Content Battlefronts –

By far the most interesting space. Commercially produced music will always operate under a structure that has way too many middlemen who have been and will continue to dominate the ecosystem to in every which way they can. I was reading an interesting article that talks about fair and equitable revenue sharing but the reality is that the ecosystem needs a disruptive shake up.

The likes of RJDJ and Soundcloud are changing this. Co-creating music and transforming the listening experience into something that’s interactive and one that makes you the artist.

Commercial music is not going to go away and has a number of barriers to overcome before true catalog consolidation takes place. This is a space where infrastructure, disposable incomes, astute pricing and packaging, market share and penetration – everything comes into play.

However, to give true power to the people, more platforms need to come that eliminate the middlemen from the ecosystem and instead brings musicians closer to their fans.

For now, I’m just happy that content monopolies are being disrupted and it is becoming a level playing field for musicians.

Over the past few years, collaboration and crowdsourcing, new ecosystems around winning products and services (Sharemyplaylists is one of my favourites!) and open source architectures have helped organizations leapfrog into new territories. However, a whole new generation of content creators are going unnoticed. The problem? Now that everybody has their 15 minutes of fame through social, and it is an enabler (level playing field) how do we put an economic value to quality content? Yes, bloggers get paid to write certain articles, but how often does it portray their true voice?

On the flip side of things, the ‘noise-to-signal’ ratio, i.e. , the quality of products and services, relative to the volume, is decreasing. A roots of this problem lies in the 3 step recipe of the success of web 2.0 –

a.Rich media content

b. a scalable platform and

c. a social graph

with these 3 elements in place, firms would find raving success. In order to scale, a platform would have to be optimal and intelligent. In order to be optimal and intelligent, it would have to be driven by algorithms, and algorithms can be reverse engineered!

I shall cite two examples from two of the dominant technologies – search engine marketing and influence marketing, which shall hopefully demonstrate the issues prevailing in the digital ecosystem today

Google and junk results

I saw an interesting debate hosted by Professor Wahdia about how Google was increasingly showing bad results in its search – and the reason is simple. Google monetized search and a whole industry was born out of Search Engine Optimization. Organic ranking, Adsense optimization – throw in a number of hot keywords in there, use the rest of the page for advertising something that might be remotely connected. Better still, take out the competition if you put enough keywords in there. The quality of information discovery is getting worse. Although, algorithms are being tuned continuously and it’s good to see that a certain degree of progress is being made to put authors in the rankings.

Twitter

Sure there is klout and there is peerindex – but there are thousands of other tiwtterati who have gone by the ‘please follow me and I’ll follow you’ mechanism of gaining some sort of critical mass. The idea being that if you have a loud enough voice – then you might get paid for saying things. As a result – don’t be surprised if you have a lead spokesperson from a bulgarian pornographic website following an Indian NGO to help slum rehabilitation!

Cake!

The video on Flattr is just brilliant. The analogy is exactly what it should be. Flattr publishes a list of things most Flattrd and a revenue chart – but really, if its a good piece of work, there’s nothing quite as rewarding as a nice slice of cake!

Crowdfunding Services like kickstarter are all around a very plan-deploy oriented. They sell a promise. But with flattr, you first do stuff, and half the reward is in purely doing it. Flattr then would be the motivation for content creators to take the plunge – will some actually pay for me to keep doing what I love doing?

It is amazing that the idea came out from the members of Piratebay! When you think of it, (and having spent a lot of time in Copenhagen and a fair bit in Malmo) I think there is a philosophy in Scandinavian innovative thinking that is very pleasing – there is as much innovation coming from a deconstructionist view as there is from a ‘need a solution’ view. Spotify and De-spotify are good examples of this trend, but I’m sure there are more.

How is it working?

Soundcloud is quite possibly the best example of a system that has a definitive use for Flattr. I think we are at a stage in the evolution of the social web where syndication platforms are the only winners. They have learnt to monetize this through content hosting, analytics and network multiplying features – although sadly, content creators still need to be commissioned for winning a project.

I think creativity is limited by the promise of a reward. Yes, necessity has been the mother of invention – but as digital technologies integrate and focus on creating integrated experiences, emerging technologies are often used in a way that the inventors had not been perceived. This can be tracked back to the story of the SMS, which was actually only used for signalling telephony traffic.

The next wave of Flattr’y

I think the next wave of adopters that will find success with Flattr are causes, artists and thought-leaders. Networks often tend to reward far-reaching and boisterous content. Flattr will change the game by rewarding honesty, humility and integrity.

Corporations can start to use it as a reward mechanism for initiatives – employees get to Flattr some causes of their choice?

Powerful platforms for creativity will be thriving with activity. I am a big fan of some of the animation channels on Vimeo and some of the portfolio based creative networks like behance is simply outstanding abound with creative ideas.

There’s a lot of good that can be done with the web. Subcultures are found to be punching way above their (expected) weight through this – and this is driven by the purpose and intent – a lot of them dont run any promotions on their sites.

I think Flattr could contribute significantly to a much cleaner and content rich web. I sincerely hope that my post survives the pollution of the web – and if you want, you too could get me some cake by clicking on the flattr button below!

Will work for cake!

Filed under: Crowdsourcing, Digital marketing, Engagement, microfinance, Open Source, spotify, start up, Strategy, Uncategorized]]>https://convergedisruptrepeat.wordpress.com/2011/07/01/the-world-is-flattrd-who-wants-cake/feed/3flattrsuryasenkIn the pursuit of #Appynesshttps://convergedisruptrepeat.wordpress.com/2011/05/21/in-the-pursuit-of-appyness/
https://convergedisruptrepeat.wordpress.com/2011/05/21/in-the-pursuit-of-appyness/#respondSat, 21 May 2011 13:24:34 +0000http://convergedisruptrepeat.wordpress.com/?p=47Continue reading →]]>I’m an avid fan of ‘The Apprentice’ on the BBC, and it was great to see the grumpy and all-knowing Lord Sugar (wonder what he eats for breakfast? pink slips? (no pun intended!)) dish out a digital task for the wannabe apprentices for a change: design, develop and market a winning app that would be an overnight success. This got me thinking is there is any coherent philosophy that we can subscribe to, to help us make better, more successful apps?

Having been around the block with startup entrepreneurs, MBAs, digital gurus, social media ninjas and advertising junkies looking to target this rather competitive space, I thought I’d share the views of a ‘creative social technologist’ with you, and look at some of the challenges that people are facing in this space.

Top of the list of things to consider – is the market size and the monetization model for the business case. Both very valid points, but – yada yada – let’s save that one for later. Innovators are so driven by the single-minded passion and the blue-sky vision they rarely get this granular in their thinking at the embryonic stages. Here is where it may be super-helpful for them to be able to easily identify the sources of competitive (dis)advantage to pivot their successes around. Think of this as the designer’s appeal to the businessman, moderated by a technologist. (What are the chances of that ever happening?! Midem tried something similar with interesting results!)

So, here’s a couple of considerations for you – (each will have different implications for you depending on the your business)

1. Consider the lifetime value of an app
If you are going to be competing in this space, it will help you to know that unless you have solid traction with your product/service in the digital realm already, you are probably going to be a one-hit wonder in the billboard charts (app stores – most popular), and the critically acclaimed (NME/Pitchfork etc – and the digital equivalent would be Wired/Techcrunch etc.)

For example, if you want to launch a game app – have more games and spin off ideas in your head, before you launch the first. Few companies have managed to remain competitive through spin offs – Rovios Angry birds (Halloween, Christmas, etc) and outfit 7’s talking tomcat (Dinosaur, Dog, Santa and Bacteria) followed. Turnaround times and volume are absolutely key to success.

Launch “everywhere” capability – this is something very few mobile applications development firms have managed to get right. Apmi App developer (the famous girl’s Venture team that escaped the talons of Lord Sugar) Grapple Mobile, apparently invested $9 Million and 4 Years in R&D to gain this capability. As Wired has put it (if you don’t believe me!) Android is almost certainly going to be the mass market mobile platform in emerging economies – so roll up your sleeves iPhone developers, if you’re not the best in class, you’re better off learning to build apps on the Android SDK right away.

2. User experience will win (competitive pricing will also win)
The first will help you establish a foothold, the second will be the weapon that your competitor will use against you to wipe you out – unless you protect your home-territory. How do you go about understanding user experience? First think about how many ways a person can interact with a connected, handheld, touch-screen device, that has an inbuilt accelerometer and a gyroscope and knows your location?

The number of permutations that arise from any number of the above-mentioned dimensions is tremendous and can spawn hundreds of plausible ideas. For example, being able to tilt a car (in a game), as opposed to say, using a trackball, gives you a wide blue ocean of opportunities to address. Think of how these things can be used with your product/service – to change the game completely.

In the spirit of starting a discussion, I thought it would be great to get your ideas on twitter – #Appyness, and I’ll try to respond to your thoughts!

This blog post is inspired by a research project that my team at Manchester Business School conducted to help a digital marketing agency

The Good.

During our research, we looked at various players in the interactive promotions industry who have invested heavily in technology. Players like Wildfire, Vitrue, Buddy Media, Strutta, Offerpop and many others have addressed the problem by providing products for brands and agencies. The advantages associated with a software as a service (SaaS) based interactive promotional offering (polls, contests, sweepstakes and UGC apps) for marketers and agencies, are that they are easy to implement, simple and cost efficient. Additionally, they can help marketers in bringing some of the core marketing and PR activities in-house or to a single corner, helping brands to have more control over the message they are trying to send across to their communities. Finally, SaaS-based products are great for repetitive simple task, such as rolling out contests, polls and sweepstakes that drive more engagement within their communities, without the burden of a technology implementation and a specialised agency. These services will be ideal for many small-to-medium businesses, with smaller marketing budgets and also great for brands that are just starting out to experiment with Facebook and other social platforms.

The Bad.

The market for SaaS-based services is fairly large, as these services are focussed on the high volume, low value market. However, there are distinct disadvantages to this model. The agency business and a brand’s online presence cannot be commoditised. Brand marketing is build on the premise of engaging consumers with campaigns that are custom-built and focuses on the brand’s individual persona. As such, as a brand matures on social media, they will want to differentiate and engage their customers in new ways. On any technology platform, new, engaging and relevant use of technology that adds value to the consumer and provides a great customer experience will clearly be the winners. And this is where I think, SaaS-based platforms will face the biggest hurdle. As brands mature on Facebook and Twitter, and they have walked the initial mile on social media, the relevance of SaaS will diminish, as brands try to have their own unique voice and their unique presence, which will define the customer experience for that particular brand.

But, it is not that Ugly.

Easy to deploy apps as I mentioned, will be great for brands and agencies, which will help them reduce costs. But the decision to use a technology platform providing undifferentiated services, as opposed to leveraging the services of a creative agency, is a tough nut to crack. I foresee costs and marketing budgets, as major factors in this decision making process. For a marketing agency, to build a SaaS-based platform for basic promotions, will require an investment up-north of $100K. The decision to use an external vendor’s SaaS product as opposed to building capabilities in-house will depend on various factors, including the customer mix, the part of the social media journey where the agency adds value to a brand (walking the first mile, as opposed to managing the brands social presence), the cost structure of the company, and the technology skillset available in-house.

Taking a close look at different customer segments for a digital marketing agency, we can start to see building in-house SaaS-based capabilities might not be a good idea. Many of their customers (think bigger brands), who have already built a strong presence on social media, have a huge amount of fans on Facebook and are now looking to engage these fans. Agencies with strong in-house creative talent can help many of the bigger brands in managing their community on social media, meaningfully, adding value and utility to the end consumer, and help provide great consumer insights. However, for small to medium business customers, who are still in the exploration phase on social media, agencies can partner with some of the SaaS-based players (such as Wildfire), to reduce the cost of their campaigns and deliver great quality services, which will help in lead generation and building a fan community.

The different needs of customers, across a typical marketing funnel can be addressed and agencies can help their customers in their journey on social (from awareness to loyalty and referral) using the suggested approach.

Filed under: Digital marketing, Strategy Tagged: Buddy Media, contests, customer strategy, Digital marketing, games, interactive promotions, marketing funnel, marketing strategy, SaaS, strategy, Strutta, sweepstakes, Vitrue, Wildfire]]>https://convergedisruptrepeat.wordpress.com/2011/03/24/should-your-digital-marketing-agency-venture-into-saas/feed/0Digital-Marketing2suvajyotiDigital-Marketing2Bubble 2.0 #1: Understanding Systematic Riskhttps://convergedisruptrepeat.wordpress.com/2011/03/02/bubble-2-0-1-understanding-systematic-risk/
https://convergedisruptrepeat.wordpress.com/2011/03/02/bubble-2-0-1-understanding-systematic-risk/#respondWed, 02 Mar 2011 09:41:08 +0000http://convergedisruptrepeat.wordpress.com/?p=40Continue reading →]]>A lot has been written recently about Bubble 2.0. The current bubble. There have been posts on Techcrunch about the Bubble 2.0and we do have many people speaking about this, including Jason Calcanis and Mark Suster on This Week In. Jason was fuming about investments made by a firm DST (Digital Sky Technology) backed by Russian LLPs. His concern was the amount of investments made by DST and some of the bets DST have taken, which are much more like playing a lot of hands like a deuce-ten or a four-seven on a poker table. However, DST is also an investor in Facebook. They led an investment of $200 million in Facebook at a $10 billion valuation in 2009. In January 2011, DST and Goldman Sachs co-led a $500 million investment round in Facebook, valuing the company at $50 billion. In last couple of years, DST has led the $180 million investment in Zynga and led a $135 million investment in Groupon at a rumoured $1.35 billion valuation. Subsequently, DST invested again as part of Groupon’s $950 million round in January 2011. It will be interesting to note how recent IPO of Mail.ru unfolds. The stock is currently trading at around $37 on LSE.

At the MBA we learn a lot about how the mechanics of a rational investment decision plays out with an internal rate of return in a company’s investment strategy. However, we are also aware of the other mode of investment. The one which at its most flamboyant extreme has been called casino banking but we will call it what it is – portfolio theory. It is a model of the tradeoff between the expected returns and risks of alternative investments. The most famous, and the original, model of the expected return–risk tradeoff is the Capital Asset Pricing Model (the CAPM). The CAPM says that investors require a higher expected return for taking on more risk and gives a precise definition of risk. The rate required is determined by adding the risk-free rate (to compensate for investing) to the risk premium (to compensate for the additional risk). We are also aware of systematic (non-diversifiable or market risk) and unsystematic risks (diversifiable or unique risk) that drive the principle of diversification, where investors reduce risk by eliminating unsystematic risk. The fact that investors can eliminate unsystematic risk by combining risky assets into a portfolio implies that an asset’s risk premium also known as the ‘beta’ (its expected return in excess of the risk-free rate) depends only on its systematic risk.

To put these in very simple words, the more we diversify our portfolio the lesser unique risk we are exposed to. But this is nothing new. However, it is interesting to note that our returns are as long tailed as our risks. At a VCPE class, one of our external lectures with years of private equity experience, Malcolm Smith, once told me that of the sixty odd deals he has been involved in, had it not been for six of them, he would not have managed to pay his mortgages. There is definitely a long tailed distribution where across our investments we have only a handful of ‘hits’ – the ones that gives you a 10x return or more. Essentially gamblers as opposed to seasoned poker players are fascinated by big hits. Many venture capital investments in the technology space are looking to take up these unsystematic company risks and bet on scale driven businesses. This is more like playing a hand with crack cards in poker and waiting for three good cards on the flop. The more of these investments in a particular industry and more of the systemic or market risk do we build into investments in that space.

In retrospect, what does this mean for us? And do I agree that there is a Bubble 2.0?

Further thoughts will be explored in the Bubble 2.0 series of posts.

Filed under: Bubble 2.0 Tagged: bubble 2.0 Digital Sky Technology Facebook MBA poker portfolio theory risk diversification]]>https://convergedisruptrepeat.wordpress.com/2011/03/02/bubble-2-0-1-understanding-systematic-risk/feed/0suvajyotirisk_diversificationOpen source + Crowdsourced = Engagementhttps://convergedisruptrepeat.wordpress.com/2011/02/23/open-source-crowdsourced-engagement/
https://convergedisruptrepeat.wordpress.com/2011/02/23/open-source-crowdsourced-engagement/#respondWed, 23 Feb 2011 21:10:14 +0000http://convergedisruptrepeat.wordpress.com/?p=22Continue reading →]]>Back in 2002, I came across this amazing, thriving community of bits and bytes coming together for solutions to problems that did not exist. It was called Sourceforge.net. You think the app store is a new concept? – it was here in a free community format years ago.

Fast forward 9 years and now, not only has technology advanced by leaps and bounds, but people have gained access to technology that is interactive, but also spreads faster. This unlocks a new realm of possibilities for businesses, but I dont think firms are taking the right approach to understanding how they can create interactive experiences and harness the information at the same time. Behavioral targeting is all very good, but at the end of the day, they way people are using such information and going down the ROI trail – it’s nothing more than voyeurism. If you are not getting people to respond to you in a new way, through multiple touchpoints, you’ve hardly ’engaged’ them.

A campaign that is running right now for the range rover evoque http://www.helloevoque.com/ is a great example of getting passionate fans of a brand together to create a movement.

HBO did a great multiplatform campaign which allowed people to look at things from new perspectives http://vimeo.com/14029101

New technologies are opening up new ways for people to interact – just search the internet for kinect hacks and you’ll find how people can become puppeteers and storytellers.

I think this is how brands should start thinking about their campaigns – not just about how many fans liked my page or how many twitter followers I have gained from the last bit of money I gave to the digital media company.

I want to create a ’cause museum’ – a place where artists and designers create a canvas for visitors to experience or express themselves, where technology is widely used and the rewards from the ’expression / interaction’ would be one that can be shared over a social network to your frends. There are lots of ways to monetize this as well.

My first idea is to have a hand operated pump that lets you pump out a holographic stream of apps onto your iPhone/iPad for 10 seconds. The ones you catch on your screen can be gifted to friends over a social network. You would need to buy some credits to play with the installations which would then proceed to the relevant charities – there are lots of villages in this world to whom it would make a world of difference if they could afford a hand operated pump in the village.

The guardian tech blog published a report about the typical tell-tale signs of yet another impending tech boom and bust cycle. http://bit.ly/hwL4Oe . Check out the nice infographic.

Having worked on a couple of projects and spoken with Angel investors, VCs and Bankers, I’m getting the feeling this is turning into another rat race of overblown valuations based on completely hypothetical business models. Everyone is talking about revenue multiples, there are tonnes of digital strategists in the market. Goldman Sachs never will come up with their reasons for valuing Facebook at $60 billion – it’s much simpler to spread the news and drive a bunch of analysts to reverse engineer this figure through their business models – isnt it? I have a degree in computer engineering and business – and I can only at certain times claim to understand a start up’s playbook/competitiveness and I’m meeting young guns and upstarts everyday who want to get into the business.

So, what will make it work this time around?

The last time I saw this happen, I was just fresh out of school and getting into college, back in India. Truth be told, I did not understand what the big fuss was about, but I was seeing the landscape changing rapidly, enterprise class technologies making rapid acquisitions (Oracle’s takeover of PeopleSoft) – which led to a 60 strong taskforce reduced to 6 in my office- based on speculations that oracle made a $10 Billion acquisition to dissolve Peoplesoft eventually. All unfounded of course – PeopleSoft continues to be strong product, albeit under the Oracle roof, although they have been easing out support.

This time round the picture has been far more interesting and I have a better understanding about the support system that creates and destroys technology.

I think European start ups typically have a longer incubation period – which probably makes them a little more stable. Investors are also a little more conservative in their estimates. I guess it’s also because of the fact that one cannot usually pull of fiendishly large number for growth/platform adoption (as opposed to the US) because of cultural/language/local competition factors.

I’m a fan of Vivek Wadhwa. Although he’s very much the all-knowing-academic-so-full-of-himself in most of his writings and talks – I think he does comes up with a fair number of relevant points when writing about entrepreneurs.